Phosphorescence

by Julia Baird

Take rainbows, for instance. For millennia humans have tried to understand the startling magic of rainbows. In dozens of myths and legends they were depicted as an archer’s bow, a snake, a bridge. For Christians, rainbows have long been a sign of God’s grace, and a promise that the Earth would never again be destroyed by a global flood. For Buddhists, the rainbow body is the highest state achievable before attaining Nirvana. In some countries, the sight of a colourful bow spanning the skies was a fearful one: children scurried into hiding places to avoid looking directly at it (in Honduras and Nicaragua) or being eaten by a demon (in Myanmar); elsewhere, people closed their mouths, men nervously girded their loins. In Bulgaria, the superstitious said that if you walked under a rainbow, you would change genders, immediately starting to think like a man if you were a woman, and a woman if you were a man. In ancient Japan, Hawaii or Greece, rainbows served as bridges between the heavens and the Earth, the ancestors and gods. For Indigenous Australians, the sacred rainbow snake represents the life-giving creator. The first modern thinker to study rainbows — and show how they occur — was the French philosopher, mathematician and eccentric genius René Descartes, who believed that wonder was the greatest of the passions. In 1628, when living in the Netherlands and studying metaphysics, he heard about the spectacular appearance of a host of false suns — known as sun dogs or parhel...